Apple long ago abandoned its original “Magical and Revolutionary” tagline for the iPad, probably out of some embarrassment at how the word ‘magical’ made so many of us groan. But the more I use, build and learn about touch-based software, the more I think magic is really a key component of this stuff, even if it’s not exclusive to the iPad.

I thought about this recently when a co-worker introduced me to Moves, an iPhone app that tracks the number of steps you take, with the aim of getting you to be more physically active from day to day. Once downloaded, you use Moves by doing… well, almost nothing. The app does everything for you, recording and parsing out your steps by mapping where you’ve traveled over the course of the day, how far and how fast, all with no user intervention required. All you have to do is the walking part, and the app quite literally does the rest, generating a complete, metered itinerary for all the walking and (most of) the places you visited in a given day.

Here is a quick list I made of some of the many mobile news apps that have entered the market over the past few years: Prismatic, Circa, Pulse, News 360, Summly, and Zite. These are all serious, well-funded and/or well-staffed entrepreneurial attempts at building the next great news brands. You can probably name at least a few others.

To some degree or another, they all propose to define a new kind of news reading experience that lies at the intersection of mobile access and customizable headlines. Some of them are pretty good at it, too. But none of them have truly come to own this category, and similarly none of them have become indispensable mobile brands the way that say Instagram has.

This situation puzzles me, because reading the news is one of the core use cases on a mobile phone — just about everyone does it. It surprises me that we’re almost six years into the iPhone-fueled smartphone era, and we don’t yet have a commonly agreed upon winner among news apps. Not just a clear leader in downloads, installs and active users, but an outright brand leader, an approximate equivalent to what CNN was in the first decades of cable news.

There is a distinction, of course, between producing original news, like CNN does, and aggregating or repackaging it, like almost all of these apps do. And maybe the fact that these brands have already come up against the limits of their popularity suggests that aggregation will always be inferior to original news.

I wouldn’t be surprised if in the long run that turns out to be the case; research suggests that legacy news brands enjoy an advantage in mobile (at least for now).

Still, I highly doubt that the combination of mobile access and customized headlines has already played itself out fully. While I take nothing away from what these apps have done so far, it strikes me that we are still just learning what mobile news consumption means, and how it’s very different from traditional or even desktop media models. As our understanding matures, new apps and brands will enter the market with radically different interaction models.

If you also have a little bit of faith that technology will continue its heretofore unceasing forward march, then it becomes quite reasonable to expect that we are due for huge innovations in relevance and automated customization sometime in the next decade, which will benefit this category of software immensely. That is, solutions to the challenge of creating a news experience tailored just for your interests (explicit and implicit) are bound to get more and more sophisticated — and accurate. The company that is the first to combine such technology with a truly advanced understanding of mobile news consumption will become the next great news brand.

Looks like the designer from “Now That’s What I Call Music” got a job at Apple.

(Originally posted on Twitter.)

A lot has been written already about Google’s announcement that it will shutter its Google Reader product on 1 July. It’s a decision that has infuriated many, partly because when the company launched Google Reader in 2005, its free price tag undercut and then virtually destroyed the market for competitive products.

Soon enough, Google Reader had become a de facto industry standard, even as it became more and more apparent over the years that the company cared little for the market that it had come to own. As its hegemony endured, an ecosystem of Google Reader-based feed reading clients came into being, like a city that builds itself on an earthquake fault line. If you were in the market for an RSS client at any time in the past three or four years, you’d have been hard-pressed to find one that wasn’t based on Google Reader. So once it passes into the next world, Google Reader will leave in its wake few if any robust alternatives for consumers to choose from.

There are some important takeaways from this unfortunate history. First in my mind is the fact that Google Reader didn’t beat every other feed reader purely because it was free. Google Reader won because it was an extremely well-executed example of interaction design.

It’s no secret that this blog has been operating at a reduced pace for some time now. I’m struggling to post much of anything, and I’m utterly failing in writing the kind of stuff I would like to be writing: longer and (hopefully) more substantive essays than what’s been posted recently, the kind that I used to turn out regularly.

And it’s hardly the case that I’ve been stumped for topics to post about, either. To the contrary, all sorts of blog post ideas continue to occur to me at all times. Often I’ll start mentally drafting them, anticipating a free moment when I can type them out and turn them into real posts that get published on this site — you know, like a blogger would do. But then a very busy day goes by, and two or three more, and before long the post no longer seems timely or unique and the moment is gone.